Question: Fleet carriers and BGS

For combat, at the very least you get guaranteed refuel/rearm/outfitting/shipyard and a large pad. Supposing it works, I wouldn't be a fan of delivering bonds/carto data at these just because of the IF tax (and potentially any other penalty since the FC isn't an owned BGS asset). Since you'd have to move the FC to the system you'd be turning these in anyway, might as well as make the extra very short trip to do it at the station for full effect.
yes, bringing services to systems missing them. the redemption office speeds up things in systems with surface ports only. and in m-pad systems, if you have player who prefer large pad combat ships, they can take any small/medium ship to pick up missions and redeem bonds at station, and than switching to their battlecows.
 
I see TDW putting up FCs for unloading goods at stations for pushing them. I'd assume at the very least that trading only looks at the station of goods being sold to calculate the influence gains based on amount/profit per ton.
the problem here being, that it is most often more (time-)efficient to do large pad trading runs "the usual way". as you already get 80% inf at 1000 cr/t of what you get at 2000 cr/t, and you can't load a FC faster than with as t9/cutter, you can in many cases as well take your t9/cutter directly, instead of adding at least 12 minutes to loading/unloading a FC. the situation looks different with station >12 minutes from entry, and it also looks different for systems with only m-pad stations.

I just want to point it out, as many players suspect a FC giving huge advantages in BGS conflicts by trade (our system is swarming with FC!) - that's not the case under most conditions, reason above.
 
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Deleted member 166264

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Btw, for someone that knows, is Hydrogen bombing still a thing?

I remember the UA bombing thing, where someone would collect a bunch of the thargoid parts and sell it at a station so it would start taking damage and then go into lockdown (or something). I'm not familiar with hydrogen bombing. What is that?
 
I remember the UA bombing thing, where someone would collect a bunch of the thargoid parts and sell it at a station so it would start taking damage and then go into lockdown (or something). I'm not familiar with hydrogen bombing. What is that?
Profit margins determine BGS economic effects, not demand/ raw purchase price, which is dumb, and hydrogen bombing is (was?) an exploit where you washed goods through an FC to create the desired effect.

So, let's say Station A buys gold for 9000 credits. If i buy gold for 8000 credits and sell it to Station (i.e i make a profit), Station A's owner gets +ve influence and economic effects.

If buy gold for 10,000cr and sell it to Station A (i.e i lose 1,000 cr), Station A's owner suffers negative influence/ economic effects.

From station A's perspective, both transactions are identical, but one is good for the station, one bad.

You can use an FC to set an artificial purchase price. So let's say you go to a station and buy hydrogen fuel (the namesake commodity, but could be any commodity) for 100cr, and you could normally sell it at station A for 120cr (profit).

If you load it onto your FC and sell it back to yourself for, say, 2000cr, all the credits go back into your pocket, so you don't really lose anything, but if you then sell that Hydrogen fuel to station A, it thinks you bought it for 2000cr, and so records a (fake) loss of 1900cr/t, causing severe negative effects for its owner.

I'm unsure if it still works, but it was a substantial exploit at the time FCs launched.
 
Yep, still works, and will probably continue to work till they totally rewrite BGS and the Market. There are no "easy fixes" for this process with the current mechanism.
well, they could 'simply' make selling for a loss (of any source) a zero-inf action methinks (but that would be changing the mechanism).
on the other hand, -inf actions got weaker and weaker in the last years, and certain goverments closing black markets takes smuggling as a tool from the table often.
 
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well, they could 'simply' make selling for a loss (of any source) a zero-inf action methinks (but that would be changing the mechanism).
on the other hand, -inf actions got weaker and weaker in the last years, and certain goverments closing black markets takes smuggling as a tool from the table often.
Mmmh... I've always argued selling to supply should be -inf, and selling to demand should be +inf, increasing with the relevant demand/supply level. At the very least, they should make it +/-econ respectively. (Although I've also argued selling to zero-demand shouldn't be a thing either...)

But it definitely shouldn't have anything to do with the profit a commander makes... it's as dumb and arbitrary as redeeming combat bonds affecting a war outcome, instead of just the kill outright.
 
Most economists still see Balance of Payments as a key health factor. Importing should not be good for the economy. FD should include buying goods and have something like:
  • Importing : Demand * (-Inf, ++Eco)
  • Exporting : Supply * (++Inf, -Eco)
To have a healthy faction, you would need to do BOTH.
You could still attack a faction with trade by flooding markets to lower Inf or draining supply to tank the Eco slider into Bust.
Oh, and fix smuggling.

But simple as this is, would require major rebalancing and abandoning their favored (and rather silly) levers.
 
  • Importing : Demand * (-Inf, ++Eco)
  • Exporting : Supply * (++Inf, -Eco)
To have a healthy faction, you would need to do BOTH.
Trouble with that would be economies like Service or Tourism where the commodity imports are represented directly in-game but the service exports aren't.

The Service economies are probably bringing in trillions daily from financial sector and similar, but on a pure commodities balance basis are massively in the red.

(Though the commodities economy is sufficiently messed up in this regard - assuming today's changes don't do anything - that even the Agricultural and Extraction primary production economies generally import far more tonnage and credit value than they export)
 
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